I tend to steer clear of space opera these days, since my tastes tend towards near-future wackiness and various cyberpunk descendants. Scott Westerfield has one worth checking out, though: well-paced space battles that make me think of Horatio Hornblower instead of Star Wars fanfic, and enough curious background politics to give a broader context to the action.

A definite two-thumbs up; the only drawback is the first book's abrupt ending. Its sequel, The Killing of Worlds isn't a sequel at all; the two books form a single cliffhanger and splitting them was an act of profound malice by the publisher. I forgive them, though.

Quite a while ago, Dark Horse Comics rolled out the first few chapters of a faithful graphic novel adaptation of HG Wells' War of the Worlds. I haven't been keeping track, but it's finished now and will soon be availlable in a nicely bound hardcover edition. They've kept the online version intact, though, along with a spiffy collection of downloadable goodies. I think I'll always prefer Alan Moore's version, nestled into a six-issue story arc for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but this version is prettty cool.

One of these days, I'm going to repay Catherine for the books she's helped me discover. I can only imagine what it would take -- perhaps singlehandedly discovering a lost treasure trove of 19th century British novels? See, I'm supposed to be the scifi lover in this relationship. I'm the one who knows about the "good stuff" like Solitaire and warns her away from the terribly pulpy dreck that hangs out in the Star Trek and Warhammer sections. She's supposed to know about Jane Eyre and Middlemarch and the classics.

But lo and behold, in the past couple of months it's been Catherine who's discovered the choice science fiction. First it was The Eyre Affair, and now The Sparrow. If things keep going this way, I'll have to apprentice myself to her and give up my CyberPunkGeek(tm) badge. Still, I'm not complaining. If all the stuff she finds is as good as The Sparrow, the sacrifice will be well worth it.

The fact that it's Marry Doria Russell's first novel makes it even more impressive. It's complex, thoughtful, and at times soul-achingly sad. In 2017, Earth begins receiving transmissions from Alpha Centauri, our next-door neighbor in celestial terms. Otherworldly singing, reminiscent of tribal music or choral hymns, drifts in on radio waves at regular intervals. The message is clear: intelligent life is out there, and it's not just communicating with prime numbers and test messages. It's sending art. The international scramble that results is predictable, but it's the Jesuits who scramble the first mission to the planet in secret -- missions to new worlds have always been their forte, after all.

The story unfolds in two parallel tracks. One follows the lives of the crew members, both Jesuits and secular experts, in the years and months leading up to the mission. There's optimism and hope and glorious potential soaked into ever word. Not only is it first contact with an artistic alien civilization, a fellow intelligent species in the universe, it's a theological first -- a mission to discover and understand the souls of a truly alien life form.

There's a dark cloud hanging over it all, though, because the book's parallel storyline makes the mission's fate clear. Forty years after the its launch, there is only one survivor: Father Emelio Sandoz, a gifted linguist who climbed from the slums of the third world to become a priest. Tortured, Body broken and soul shredded, we meet him sequestered in 2060 Florence by the Jesuits. The mission to the world of Rakhat went horribly wrong, and the world knows it -- he was found mad in an alien brothel by a subsequent UN contact team and sent back to Earth in disgrace. Now blood is in the water and the Jesuits are determined to find out the full truth.

While the first hundred pages or so show the strain of introducing two full sets of characters in a pair of linked plots, Russell's excellent writing pulls it through. There's always something going on inside her characters, the dialogue is excellent and the science is clear without being dumbed-down. The story of what happened to the Rakhat team is teased out like a mystery, and by the time the book found its legs, I was sucked in. I needed to find out what had gone wrong, what had turned a brilliant and increasingly joyful priest into a guilt-wracked shadow.

First contact stories have always been a scifi staple. They give hard science writers a chance to speculate on all the nitty gritty fun stuff an alien civilization has to offer, from biology to religion to social structures to alternate evolutionary paths. The sub genre is also one of the most thoughtful scifi has to offer, full of moral and ethical quandaries and parallels to Europe's discovery of The New World. Orson Scott Card, in his Speaker for the Dead series, dealt with some of the same themes. Mary Doria Russell's writing, though, leaves Card's in the dust.

Without preaching, without grandstanding, without Heinleinesque soliloquies, Russell embraces tremendously complex human questions. What is it to live in a world where God cannot be trusted to end pain? What are the limits of love, devotion, and sacrifice to a God who can't be touched? How can we live when belief seems like a cruel joke and atheism is the punch line? As one character says, "Not one sparrow can fall without God's notice. But the sparrow has still fallen." There are no simple solutions offered; The Sparrow is a story of the struggle to understand, the struggle to cope, and the struggle to explain the questions to accusers seeking tidy answers.

The book is an excellent interpretation of classic first-contact themes, ones that've been explored by numerous other writers. It has the enthusiastic science, the unfolding discovery of alien customs, the looming danger of tragic misunderstandings. It's Russell's excellent writing and philosophical depth that set the book apart, though. The themes she's willing to tackle, the complexity and honesty of each character she writes for... the book's rough edges fade for me and I'm left convinced it's one of the best in the genre -- it's just good literature. An addendum includes an interview with the author, discussing her own experiences and the book's genesis. There's even a collection of discussion questions for groups interested in exploring the issues it raises.

Do you like scifi? Do you like meaty character-driven writing? Are you a biped? Yes, I thought so. Go out. Get it now. I'm off to pick up its sequel, Children of God, first chance I get.

To say that FutureLand is a thought-provoking book is an understatement. It has weaknesses, but it sucked me in -- I read the whole thing in one sitting last night, a three hundred page cruise that left me pondering. The fact that I'm still conflicted about the book's merits a day after reading it only makes it more intriguing. For pure reading pleasure, it ranks far below most of my scifi favorites. The quality of the writing is middle-of-the-pack, not enough to qualify as literature but far better than the Tor-published pulp that floods the scifi rack at your local Borders. Characterization is almost always a distant second to concept, some stories rely heavily on painfully phonetic vernacular, and like most writers taking a stab at the slippery cyberpunk genre, he seems to assume that "dystopia plus relationship" equals "cheap driveby sex."

In quite a few ways, though, Mosley repurposes the cyberpunk palette of information saturation, gene hacking, global corporations and militaristic businesses. Rather than stitch together the usual trendy popcorn about streetwise pan-ethnic outsiders beating the system in a post-corporate dystopia, he uses the nine linked short stories to tackle complex questions of racial and economic equality. While most authors assume a Trekkish racially neutral future, where ethnic tension is the domain of white-trash religious enclaves, Mosley envisions a 2030s world where today's complex issues of race, class, and inequality are amplified rather than erased. Protagonists are black -- African American? Negro? He uses a smorgasbord of racial terms but the message comes through. He's exploring the future of a race, the concept of a real life in a cyberpunk underclass, rather than a Mirrorshades Fantasy.

FutureLand kicks off with the story Ptolemy Bent -- Popo, as his stroke-ridden mother calls him. Ptolemy's a bright kid of two and a half years: he can read, he understands complicated ideas, and he loves to learn. Problem is, he's part of the black underclass. Barefoot and wild, he learns via a stolen computer and a pirated library of congress archive courtesy his ex-con uncle. His uncle fights to keep the kid at home, hiding him from welfare workers who want to IQ-test Ptolemy and haul him off to magnate schools where he'll be taught to work and turned into a corporate cog. As Ptolemy tinkers, plays with old radios, and grows, he hears voices others have missed -- something out there in the information noise. Is it God? Is it an alien intelligence? Who knows -- he's arrested and sent to life on an island prison before his genius can bear fruit.

It's confusing at first. Unlike most short scifi collections, FutureLand's nine pieces are all woven together, connected by a larger narrative that spans several decades. Ptolemy's story bears the weight of introducing key ideas other pieces will build on, and while it's interesting it takes three or four more stories for some of the bits in the first one to make sense. Mosley's vision of the 2030s is grim like a government poverty reportThe constitution mandates employment for those who qualify, leaving those who don't to a crushing life of poverty. Criminal convictions? Too stressed to work? Sorry, you're off the dole and living in Common Ground, a nationwide network of underground subsidized living. You're sleeping in tubes, eating free beans and rice for months at a time, and praying for the next employment cycle, when you might get a shot at flipping burgers.

Other stories cut to different angles: One explores the fate of a convicted hacker, stripped of citizenship and shipped to a corporate prison island beyond the reach of national law. Shackled, drugged, and monitored for thought-crimes, he's told he'll be set free if he goes three years without a black mark. It's an impossible task, though, and he faces a life of harvesting the prison's tobacco crop for the man. Another story follows the knife-edge drama of a radical petitioning the most powerful man on the planet -- the God of a corporate empire, the founder of a new InfoTech religion. The radical's betting his own life to save a nation of impoverished Africans from corporate takeover. If he fails, it's up to his compatriots to take up arms and stop the corporation the hard way. As the stories play out, common threads start pulling together and it becomes clear that the narratives are connected by more than just themes. There's a racial war brewing, with white supremacists, bioengineering terrorists, and multinational conglomerates locked in a struggle for power.

Mosley is clearly, obviously, unambiguously throwing the issue of race and class struggle in the reader's face. Sometimes it gets in the way of cleanly flowing narrative, and other times it reads like a conservative commentator's dream straw man come true. "What? Murderers should be let off the hook because they were impoverished? Nonsense! The black man is being kept down by the powerful elites? Silliness!" He's persistent, though. While most science fiction is willing to paint poverty with a few quick brush strokes and move on to the geeky bits, Mosley dwells. He raises questions and offers no answers. He presents uncomfortable, difficult scenarios. His characters do bad things and sometimes are untroubled by them.

But FutureLand, above all else, forces thought. It forces you to engage and question and ponder Mosley's vision in a way that very few works of scifi do. Bruce Sterling once said that all good science fiction is really about the present. While the intensity of FutureLand's racial and economic divide may seem extreme, a trip to present day inner city enclaves like Cabrini Green makes it clear that the problem is here today. If we aren't willing to confront it now, a few decades of exotic implants, biotech, and faster broadband won't eliminate the problem.

Light looked promising, I'll give it that. Between Catherine and I, it's obvious who's the science fiction fan. I mean, I read the Doom novels for crying out loud. That doesn't mean, though, that I'm not delighted and relieved at the prospect of scifi with literary heft -- high quality writing, hurrah! Light promised to be just that, with a boatload of positive reviews, classy graphic design, and that ultrasexy ragged-edge paper you get when they don't trim the pages after printing. (I know, I shouldn't be affected by things like that. In the interest of honesty, though, I'll say it flat out. I'm more likely to buy a book if the paper is nifty. There. It's out.) Unfortunately, the paper test failed me this time. The writing is interesting, from a technical standpoint, but the story itself falls flat. Way flat.

The premise has promise. Michael is a physicist, not unattractive, enough of a cipher that ladies find him intriguing. He and his partner are scraping the bottom of the funding barrel as they delve into the world of chaos and quantum theory, searching for meaningful patterns in the statistical noise of the universe. Investors are nipping at their heels, Michael's relationship with his estranged wife is pornographically unhealthy, and -- oh, can't forget this part -- Michael is a serial killer. For years, a terrifying otherworldly entity has been chasing him, hunting him through time and space for reasons he can only begin to guess at. It knows his steps before he makes them, and it's closing in. The only way he can throw it off his scent, he's learned, is to kill. The real energy of the book comes from this central tension. Will his research unearth the secret of this thing? Will his secret life as a murderer destroy him before he can find out the truth? Does he want to kill, or is he forced to? Is he even human anymore?

Two other fast-forward plots, hundreds of years in the future, are woven into the story. We learn that Michael's research did bear fruit and became the basis for civilization and species-altering societal changes. The characters in these flash-forwards are clearly tied to Michael in some way that we don't quite yet understand, and John Harrison unfolds the puzzle like an origami trick. Unfortunately, the trick turns out to be about as interesting as a perfect origami recreation of a DMV office. Novel, technically impressive, and depressingly pointless.

Ultimately, if you make your main character a serial killer, he'd better have a hell of a lot of positive qualities to maintain a shred of sympathy. His terror is palpable when the mysterious entity is stalking him, but when that crisis disappears, Michael is a cold fish. Arrogant. Distant. Cold. Self-absorbed. And, yeah, a complete sociopathic killer. The supporting characters in the flash-forwards are just as unsatisfying. While they lack Michael's taste for blood, they're postmodern ciphers, random quarks bouncing around the plot with no real life and no real connections. When we discover that two key characters, haunted by foggy memories of their childhoods, are actually siblings, it's hard to even muster up the will to care. "Yeah, yeah, the bit in chapter 11 makes perfect sense now... Should I be interested?" When the solution to the book's great mystery is finally revealed -- Why does Michael kill? What is the creature? -- it's all a big misunderstanding. In perfect postmodern style, none of it meant anything.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. The scifi geekery helps smooth the rough edges for genre fans like myself. The writing is technically good -- it's not the pulpy "Biff! Pow! Gadgets!" cliche you'll find in the average Tor paperback. But hundreds of authors come up with inventive scifi geekery every day, and hundreds more write compelling, engaging high-quality fiction every day. Light, for all its promise, feels like a cheat. Harrison hints at intriguing ideas but never explores them. Touches on unsettlingly cruel themes in humanity, but never has the guts to confront them. Suggests a fascinating plot, but leaves it to the reader to imagine the tricky details. Even the darkness of the premise is an affectation, a tease of something deeper that never delivers.

Man. I really am being harsh. But I think it's the truth. Let this be a lesson to you, publishers: if you make a book out of nifty paper, I expect it to deliver. Here's hoping that The Eyre Affair is a better read. From what Catherine says, it will definitely be a step in the right direction.